Afghanistan

04/21/2014

John Schindler, the former NSA official and professor at the US Navy Academy, has a theory of "special wars" -- basically running wars like the Russians do in order to be able to fight them.

Except, I'm quite sure neither he nor any supporters would like that reductive description of the concept.

I love John Schindler's stuff -- don't get me wrong. I always marvel that someone that young who didn't directly fight the Soviets in the dissident trenches understands so much about them and their methods, and is even able to teach others about it methodically. It restores my hope in the NSA after Snowden, which for me, like CableGate, is at least in part about the failure of government to keep out the adversarial hacker culture that accompanies wikification and moving life online.

Schindler has been absolutely right on Snowden and all things related to it, so I take seriously any theory he comes up with about how to fight the Russians better, especially now that they have really gone full-tilt into enemy mode. I'm all for containment, Cold War, deterrence -- the works because all of that is required with this kind of real threat to the West.

So how hard will it be to put "special war" over politically, given the Obama "progressives" and what is to come if they succeed again in 2016?

I've been thinking about it since last year, and have questions about it:

Ever since I heard of Schindler’s “special war” theory last September, I’ve pondered whether I like it or not — but then, war isn’t something you “like like” – as you do a Facebook kitty. There’s the Catholic theory of “a just war” which should have as its goals the ending of war. Does it fit?

I wonder how some of its aspects are to be distinguished from what used to be called “CIA dirty tricks” — and maybe it’s not. For those who don’t want to endorse drones and mass killing, “special wars” is an attractive alternative. And indeed, any moral person has to ask why we wouldn’t opt for “special wars” that are more efficient, require much less troops, seem brainier, and are more pin-pointed. That is, a drone might have “collateral damage” or hit women and children or wedding guests while going after the fighters who deliberately mingle among them — there’s lots of angst about drones become of the remoteness of the operation of them. Then massive numbers of troops — as in the “surge” in Afghanistan — that just seems to get lots of our soldiers killed, and not win the war anyway — precisely because we live in the age of “special wars” which the Russians and the Taliban for that matter are really good at.

So wouldn’t we rather have an intelligence agent parachute in and assassinate the Pakistani ISI operative who is sustaining the Taliban, or infiltrate a political party, or get inside the prime minister’s office, or whatever it is that you do, instead of massing troops around borders and trying to drone away militants. In the old days, that’s what the CIA did, and it worked in some places, but it got a bad rap.

That’s my question then. Once “special wars” gets going, how will it deal with the bad rap? The Russians and even some Ukrainians think the US has mercenaries parachuted into southeastern Ukraine already (we don’t); what if we start really doing that sort of thing?

Next, there is so much wrong with the military — scandals in the top leadership, suicides, massacres of civilians, PTSD– as I’ve noted before, I think this is a mismatch between the reality of what war is, and the PR campaign that the armed forces insist on retaining, which implies that you “learn a skill” and “get a job” through the military — meaning that the poor people who come into this setting think their goal is to get a skill and be assured of a job, instead of going into dangerous places and killing people. So that begs the question: can we make “special wars” with *this* army?

In general, I’d like to see less contractors in the armed services and government in general — most problems we’ve had — think of Snowden – are related to them. So would “special wars” be done with contractors? I think it would be better to have permanent, trained, regular armed services doing this.

We also need more HUMINT, foreign languages, education — how will that be assured? Can existing academies like West Point create the cadres of the “special wars” or does some other academy have to be created?

Finally, what about the moral problem of “becoming like them”? The Russians are good at “special wars” because they’re cynical nihilists exploiting illiberal ideas like nationalism or Eurasianism. Can you get good at “special wars” and remain decent?

So basically, it comes down to this: if Schindler means that we should get better at fighting the Russians who use this whole array of Bolshevik methods, from disinformation to masking to lying to agitation and propaganda -- by using more counter-intelligence and counter-propaganda, I'm for that. But how much will we be lying, cheating, disinforming, faking, masking, ourselves then?

Would it involve committing terrorism against civilians?

That is, I'm for exposing propaganda, calling out lies, vigorously challenging all the bullshit coming out of the Kremlin and broadcasting much more of it than we do. I'm for getting a lot more clever about dealing with this ruthless enemy in the Kremlin. Some of that requires clandestine work that the public will have to take on faith needs to be done, and the less they know about it, the better. But how to get that through in the age of Snowden, where the default of most young people is to distrust government and imagine the US is the greatest evil in the world?

12/26/2013

Let me put it in a nutshell -- I'm a supporter of national armies, I'm not a pacifist, even if I have objections to the war in Iraq or aspects of the war in Afghanistan and the drones program on moral grounds. I think we live in a dangerous world with really awful and nasty enemies that we didn't create by warring against them or their proxies, who are really evil all on their own. I'm not so sure the surge was a great idea, and we pretty much lost the war in Afghanistan, which I find awful, as I do know something about this region, and I think it will definitely go downhill into worse security and more instability and poverty for the people of Eurasia and South Asia.

But while we can argue about whether this or that war makes sense, or this or that way of pursuing the war, or whether "special wars" (clandestine and even illegal intelligence operations) have to take the place of massive armies marching in the night and people dying in the mud, there has to be a discussion about what I see is a looming moral problem.

Why is the military so messed up? We've had a military that has *created* and *not saved us from* harm by giving us Manning, Snowden, McCrystal, Petraeus, Bales, and Carey -- to mention just some of the most lurid, most destructive figures who have been through our armed forces and have objectively wound up hurting their own countries tremendously.

Why is that? Why did this happen?

So let me go through my thinking on this:

I know it's Christmas, but I really couldn't take it more -- the lastest "returning soldier surprise" story was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

I know for some it's tantamount to treason to question these heart-wretching but usually kitschy stories that appear practically every day, especially in mass media and local newspapers, but I do. I really find them reprehensible. I always have. They've always irritated, then angered me. (They irritate me as much as the sly and manipulative "Support Our Troops" meme which witless Dem operatives purveyed in lieu of a real peace movement -- hey, be against wars if you want, but at least have the decency not to pretend that you are "for" soldiers as if they are like union employees just "doing a job."

Here's why all those stories about soldiers surprising their little kids in their elementary schools with an unexpected early return home, or soldiers appearing suddenly at their mom's birthday party, or soldiers suddenly showing up to propose marriage, or soldiers suddenly appearing at their brother's workplace -- why none of them work for me.

That is, sure, they're nice, and no doubt the people in the stories really appreciate them and are awfully glad to have their loved ones home surprising them like this.

But their institutionalization as a meme, as a staple of culture, as a news diet, as a kind of justification of everything -- that just doesn't work.

And here's why -- first, two big reasons -- and then the rests of the reasons why I find the military just so screwed up these days and think it should change:

1) Because they didn't HAVE to go to these wars. They are in a voluntary army. They were not conscripted. Especially women could CHOOSE to stay home with a NEWBORN BABY, for example, good Lord, no war is worth leaving a nursing baby for when you don't have to! A newly-married husband doesn't have to join the army, either, he can stay home with his new wife. A father of two elementary school kids really does have choices and doesn't need to ensure that they grow up without him and risk turning into little felons or drug abusers.

And so on. They chose to go overseas to fight in a war, then they should accept that this will mean hardship and even possibly deprivation and grief for their families and loved ones. That's why their sudden showings and media-saturated surprises just don't add up. The poignancy part, I mean. The drama. There was no need, because you didn't really have to go.

Why not do the hard job of staying home and taking care of your responsibilities and getting a good education and a good job on your own? Then maybe you'd have something to bring to -- instead of taking from -- the armed services.

2) Because the armed forces have engaged in a massive public relations program for years which amounts to this: join the army, learn a trade, get an education for free, and get a job when you get out. This seems really attractive to a lot of people. But it's hugely misleading. They paint a picture as if you have to go through a bit of a rugged boot camp, sure, but then you are taught all these interesting skills useful in the private sector. Yes, you have to go overseas, but you'll either be on a ship somewhere, or you'll be in Germany, or maybe South Korea, or maybe merely just sitting in Texas. or maybe you'll go to Afghanistan, but not very long, and in any event, even if you do, you don't have a huge chance of being killed. Then college-- paid for -- and that great job! With that great resume-booster provided free by Uncle Sam.

This "learn a skill, get a job" stuff is very deep-seated, and you find all sorts of people drawing on it, mainly in the lower classes,the poor, or the clueless middle class that is turning into lower class due to recessions and lay-offs. You even hear people tell themselves that they have "no choice" but to go "get a job" in the army because there are "no jobs" elsewhere.

I personally find this bullshit, as those who want to work can get jobs -- they just might not be jobs with free education and exotic travel and missions to go with them.

3) It's my firm conviction that the reason we have so many people having psychotic breaks in the armed forces, and going crazy and killing civilians, or coming home and committing suicide, or suffering from PTSD and substance abuse, is because of the massive disconnect between the advertisements, and the shill about "learn a trade, get a job" and the reality which is -- be trained in something that might help our mission of killing people, kill then, then go home and resume your normal life.

We're unable to create a valid and efficient killing machine when necessary, and what we have instead is an army of job trainees who seem shocked and surprise that their internships and apprenticeships have IEDs in them.

I think this goes up the chain, and the sense of "you are special, we trained you, and now you're fabulous" sets up a situation where you feel you can have affairs, get drunk, be abusive, not do your duty, all because it's about you, and not anything else.

I really think the army has to step back from how they do this recruitment, how they set up expectations, and change the message and the perception managements. And I'm confident if they do, they will get better people and better outcomes. But this will require a wrenching re-evaluation and changes of policy.

They tried "the few, the proud, the Marines" to emphasize how they really needed good, intelligent, skillful, rare people, and not dumbasses who take drugs and can't hold a job - but then they forgot that there's still the other three branches of armed service to fill -- and they needed more than just a "few". Somehow, the pumping up of egos involved in getting "the few, the proud" led us not to Navy SEALS killing bin Ladn, or whatever our "gold standard" is for selfless, unsung heroics of good people doing their duty, but has led us to generals who behave outrageously and subject their nation to indelible humiliation and denigration.

I live next door to a National Guard depot and I see the kinds of people there, and my son has various friends who have "deployed," as they describe it. How can I describe this? Well, the very word explains the mindset. These are people who either barely graduated from school, are from poor or immigrant families, who don't have a lot of prospects, who for various reasons of background needed the security of having everything organized for them. They don't say, "I'm going into the army to serve my country, it's my duty." They don't say "We have a mission to fulfill, these terrorists need to be shown who's boss" or "if we don't stop the creeping menace of Islamism, our own freedoms will be in jeopardy," they say "I'm in training"and "I'm being deployed" in the same tone of voice as people describe being sent for training and then a job in another state if they decide to work or IBM or Accenture.

They've absorbed the recruitment message and they embody it -- and it's a problematic message because we all know that they won't get a job with this "training" after they return and we're lucky if they even manage to fight the war they're plopped into. Instead of getting jobs and going on with their lives, they have an excellent chance of coming back with substance abuse problems, PTSD, and emotional problems that if anything, prevent them from ever becoming productive members of society.

4) I'm not a pacifist, and I don't have a problem with people deciding to serve in the army for whatever reason; indeed, our national security depends on it. Neither of my grandfathers served in World War II, I have no idea why, but apparently their ages were such that they were a bit too old and had large families to support and worked in factories. My father served in the Korean War. His father had died in an accident and he had his mother and disabled sister to support. They rented out the top floor of their house and lived downstairs, he went to high school and worked nights at Wendt's, a dairy, as a soda jerk. He lied about his age to get into the army at 17 even before graduation but he always said he was "performing his duty for his country" and always understood it as the just cause of fighting Communism even if he was in fact a kid who needed skills and a job.

He got them. He also got the GI bill and then graduated with a degree in engineering. The people who didn't die in a war like the Korean War continued as walking advertisements -- join the army, learn a skill, get a free education, get a job. It worked -- at least, better than it works now. My father was good with languages, he passed a proficiency test and was sent to Russian school and worked as a linguist for the Army Air Corps (predecessor of the Air Force) in intelligence. He flew up in planes and listened to Soviet pilots chattering and swearing and reported on what they were saying. He left the army with varicose veins from all the marching and sitting in cramped airplanes and jumping out of them now and then, and then went into civilian life to work as a ceramic engineer until his death. He always spoke of the army as a duty, not a career enhancement, and as something that had a lot of suffering and unpleasantness in it.

5) I've come to the idea of supporting conscription not because of the notion John Schindler mentions of saying "if the elites had their own sons serve, they'd have less wars or be more cautious about getting into wars." I don't think that's a proven hypothesis. After all, the Queen of England had her relatives serving in Afghanistan and that didn't make the UK decide they shouldn't get involved in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

I think it's more like this, however: before, armed service was a path to success -- it meant you could run for political office or advance in a company because you were believed to be merited and trustworthy. But after Vietnam, that ceased. And with the last two wars, it didn't work, even with very decent people deploying; they didn't go run for Congress. I remember meeting a recent new member of Congress at the Foreign Policy Institute who had actually served in the army and it was a total shock -- no Congress people do nowadays. And that's because it's not viewed as a career path -- oh, except for my son's friends who five minutes ago were hanging around Union looking to score weed and playing with iPhones and dropping out of school, and now are supposedly trained enough and smart enough to fight a war. They are getting training, and free education, and they'll get a job, right? But they could barely graduate or get a GED in the NYC high school system, which is an abomination...

So my thinking about conscription works like this: if you had conscription, then you'd get lots more people, smart people, people without illusions that they will "get a job" from serving in the army, people who "get it" about what an army really is for, people who can realize that there's a job to do, a hard and unpleasant and risky job, before they return to civilian life which they would have made for themselves *without the armed forces*.

6) I don't have illusions about the draft. I lived through the Vietnam era, don't forget. I remember that my classmates brothers were drafted, and some of them got killed and it was very sad. Of course, if you were rich and connected, you could get out of the draft, or you could just guard a swimming pool in Texas (a famous example always discussed in that era in our town based on some guy who supposedly really did that). You didn't have to be rich and famous, either, because of the concept of draft deferment if you were in college, or if you had a teaching job. That was how my uncle avoided the draft -- first going to college, then teaching elementary school. I don't think he particularly enjoyed teaching, which was hard and low-paid, but I think he preferred that to going to Vietnam and having a chance of getting killed.

Remember they fixed THAT problem of too many deferments by starting a lottery. And that was really scary. Suddenly, our music teacher and band leader could get drafted. Our neighbours could get drafted. And did. And then some got killed. Of course there was a fair amount of opposition to the war; I went to my first anti-war demonstration when I was 14. But by and large, in small towns outside the big cities, people did their duty. That's how they understood it. They hoped for the best. I worked in the US Post Office with a lot of veterans and disabled veterans, because they got points awarded on the civil service exam for the USPS so that they'd have jobs, and these were serious people who served their country and did their duty.

But "Vietnam vet" in a lot of cases came to mean people who were crazy, drug-abusers, off the grid, bikers, whatever. This idea of "learn a trade, get a job," fell away...

7) Not that many people were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by contrast with other wars. But they were maimed and killed more in real time on the air on instant media and social media and it therefore loomed larger perhaps. And they did in fact get killed in increasing numbers -- numbers that flew in the fact of that "the few, the proud" propaganda and the "learn a trade, get a job" shill.

8) Our armed forces are really, really hurting. And I don't think that's because they are "stretched thin" in "two long wars". That is, sure, they take their toll. World War II was "only" six years and the Korean War was "only" three years -- but more people died in them than in these wars. I actually think the "set and setting" problem of the Army recruiment propaganda and the kinds of people they wind up attracting with that misleading promise of "skills and jobs" are central to the problem. The army reflects the problem of society in the family, education, the work place, but itself is serving as an incubator worsening them.

Chelsea Manning is a classic example. She was smart, actually had computer and analytical skills largely self-taught on "the Internet", but was an EDP, to use the cops' lingo, an "emotionally disturbed person" who flopped around not knowing what to do, with an alcoholic and abusive dad or something, with identity issues, who felt the army would not only give her "a good education and a good job" where the regular economy hadn't, but would also "pull her together". It didn't. The rest is history.

Edward Snowden is another good example. We never learn how this high-school drop-out, also with an absentee dad, who seemed to also have good self-taught Internet-learned skills, felt he had to go in the army -- where he promptly broke both legs, instead of "learning a skill and getting a good job". Even so, he migrated toward related national security work, but questions remain: how clueless do you have to be to break not one, but two legs in basic training? Maybe you're "an indoor cat" who shouldn't have joined and no one should have let you? Or how negligent do the armed services have to be? We don't know. But Ed was not "good people" for the real job of the army, which is serving your country and fighting a war, not getting an all-expense paid training and job placement program.

And there are more, and higher-level fuck-ups -- but first, a personal story.

8) My own son went and joined the Marines but didn't finish the process and now is ineligible for service. I wasn't thrilled with the idea, but he was of age, and it was his decision and I thought (I'm not immune to the propaganda, either), he might "learn a trade and get a good job" where these things had failed in civilian life.

He went through various physical and written exams, briefing sessions, interviews, etc. and was getting ready to ship out to Parris Island. But then due to a confluence of various circumstances in his own life and the draw-down being announced, there were delays and then he began to get cold on the idea. For one, the recruiting officer began to tell him that he really should stay in college, then go in the Marines, it would only be better for him to go into higher-level training. Also, I won an electric motorcycle at TechCrunch Disrupt with the express pitch that I hoped it would be something that would keep him out of the Marines because I didn't want him to be sent to Afghanistan and be one of the last people to become disabled or die there (and I guess fate rewarded us there...Man proposes, God disposes...)

I had reasons to believe this would be the case that he would die, or worse, become disabled. Naturally he had more of a chance of becoming disabled in a motorcycle accident, and sadly that's exactly what happened.

But even as he used that argument to persuade me that Afghanistan was going to be "safe," I could see that for this kid, even my own son whose father was jailed in a Soviet psychiatric hospital because he refused to go in the army when Czechoslovakia was being invaded, there was only the haziest notion of the war in Afghanistan, despite all my work in human rights and the UN and discussing the issues at home, and only the foggiest concept of any mission or duty. To country, to society, let alone to vulnerable people overseas whose country was overrun with thugs.

But there was much, much more prevelant in his thinking was that he was going to "get training" and "get a good job". The Cisco network training which his high school provided -- which he didn't finish -- didn't grab him. But somehow, the army -- which would amount to the same thing only with the chance to get up early in the morning, eat grub, run around like hell and then have a chance to die -- was going to do it.

In real life, in the civilian sector, prospects for somebody with less than a year in college, which he didn't like, were not great -- he worked variously many hours a week for low pay as an insurance salesman, a cell phone salesman, an electricity salesman, a computer repairman and it was all going nowhere. Occupy sent a very powerful message even to this family that definitely opposed Occupy and its Marxist politics: if you load up on college debt, you may not be abe to pay it back for years and you may not get a good job. The army looked attractive in those circumstances, when your prospects were years more of selling insurance and going to school nights. It's too bad they were winding down the wars, eh? Everywhere the message went out to stop recruiting so heavily and now they can afford to pick better people.

Recruiting officers tell kids now -- hey, go back to school. Hey, you have that drug charge or that robbery charge? Well, we can still let you in, but now we're going to look for people with cleaner records. You didn't do very well on the test because you didn't pay attention and barely graduated from high school? Well, we're going to find people who are better than you now. But that isn't what they did for the last ten years, and it shows.

9) The people at the top in the military have let us down appallingly. I am still trying to understand this. How could this happen? Some years ago I was interviewed by Rolling Stone and appeared in a story there about Second Life and I know exactly what they do with you: they make fun of you. Deliberately. I knew that going into it. That's what they do if you aren't a rock star, duh! I can't imagine being so stupid as to hang out with their reporters and drink and tell them stories. You'd have to be ignorant or so vain that they could play on your vanity. So much for McChrystal, who I thought was a lot smarter.

Petraeus -- what the hell? You have this exemplary career, you have this incredibly important duty to perform with many people depending on you and your country's safety and reputation at stake, and you screw it up by letting this manipulative biographer get you into an affair and then expose you to scandal? What? How vain and stupid do you have to be?

Bales. You sound like a person who had lots of problems before you deployed that you thought the army would fix for you. Either your vanity and belief you could do what you couldn't led you to back-to-back deployments, or somebody in charge of deployment had the poor judgement to deploy you (what, they ran out of job-seekers and stupid drug users in New York City?) But all in all, the set and setting seems to have contributed to the appalling massacre of innocent Afghan civilians you should have been taking the utmost care to protect. Didn't you have any sense of duty?

And Carey. Gosh, I could almost understand the back stories of Manning and the others, maybe it's just human nature. But my God, what an asshole. Getting drunk with the Russians?! With known operatives serving as honey pots from the GRU? While you are responsible for nuclear weapons?! What are you fucking stupid? Or is it so vain that you think you can do no wrong? I'm just BAFFLED.

So you can see that I find a theme here -- vanity. Telling little darlings they are wonderful. Special. Only the few, the proud. That they will advance their lovely careers. That they will turn from losers into productive members of society because they will "get trained and get a job". It reminds me of all the Yuppie moms in the playground with their endless ego-boosting of their toddlers, and their endless, inexhaustive ability to empathize with the wants and needs of their little monsters instead of setting limits and insisting on good behaviour.

"Use your indoor voice, Tommy" or "We don't throw sand, Janie" or "what do you need, apple juice? A graham cracker? a Samsung tablet?" instead of getting a "No, stop that, or we're leaving" or "no, snack-time is at 4 pm, it's not time yet."

You know what I mean?

And all of this is horribly, horribly wrong. We need to change all this, radically. From top to bottom. it isn't even so much about changing to a draft versus voluntary -- it's about THIS. It's about GETTING RID of the idea that the army is here to serve YOU, instead of you SERVING THE ARMY. It's about finding people who could get a job in civilian life, but choose to do this other, harder thing because they love their country. It's about setting up the expectations right, and weeding out the EDPs better. It's about saying "You're not going to get anything out of this, and might lose your leg." It's about ending the "heroics" of the "surprise dad" and that brave soul learning to walk on artificial limbs who had the misfortune to have a "training accident" while he was in his "job program". It's about creating fighting men and women who fight like they're going to win, who get that war is sacrifice, not self-aggrandizement.

It's a hard and tricky thing. On the one hand, you want to instill a sense of mission, of responsibility, of America's role in the world. On the other hand, you don't want this:

Ms. [REDACTED] states that Maj Gen Carey was visibly agitated about the long delay at Zurich, he appeared drunk and, in the public area, talked loudly about the importance of his position as commander of the only operational nuclear force in the world and that he saves the world from war every day.

“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said. “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”

“That whole question — who elected you? — inverts the model,” he said. “They elected me. The overseers.”

He named the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees.

“Dianne Feinstein elected me when she asked softball questions” in committee hearings, he said. “Mike Rogers elected me when he kept these programs hidden. . . . The FISA court elected me when they decided to legislate from the bench on things that were far beyond the mandate of what that court was ever intended to do. The system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility.”

And so on. You get the idea.

People who have a sense of a purpose higher than themselves before which they become humble, not arrogant.

It used to be religious upbringing accomplished this, or perhaps life on a family farm. Then maybe school or civic clubs could provide it. Nothing provides it anymore.

There's just the Internet.

I'm not an expert and I don't know how this can be accomplished. But not only experts should get to decide these things. All citizens get a say in their votes and in their freedom of expression.

11/10/2013

I find a lot of revisionism of history by the Twittering masses, especially about the war in Afghanistan.

The average idiot on social media believes that the US has killed the most people in the world (false) and that the US has especially killed a lot of the people in Afghanistan (false) which was all our fault because we somehow lured the Soviets into the war (false), supported Osama bin Ladn against them (false) and then caused the Taliban to be born as well (false).

All of these anti-American fictions never start with a firm grasp of the Soviet communist terror, where some 50 million people were killed, and never have a handle on the 10 years of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, where one million civilians were killed.

When, during the short ensuing war between India and Pakistan, Nixon implicitly threatened India by ordering a nuclear aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Enterprise, into the Bay of Bengal, millions of Indian minds went dark with geopolitical paranoia. Nixon and his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, became, as Mistry puts it, “names to curse with.” Mistry’s protagonist amplifies a commonplace conjecture: “The CIA plan” involves supporting Pakistan against India, because India’s friendship with the Soviet Union “makes Nixon shit, lying awake in bed and thinking about it. His house is white, but his pyjamas become brown every night.” . . .

Yes, Kissinger and Nixon did bad things, we all recognize that. Yes, they are responsible for wars and loss of life. A huge protest movement was mounted against them, successfully, in the end, by the way.

But let's put this era in a much more credible perspective, shall we?

The reason the nefarious Kissinger and Nixon could get other members of government and the general public to be reluctant about India, and support its enemy Pakistan strategically, is because India was busy friending up the Soviet Union then, as the author admits.

That was a bad thing the author doesn't admit.

At that time not only did the Kremlin preside over a vicious system responsible for the unjust jailing and torture of tens of thousands, it had behind it the millions of people massacred by Lenin and Stalin. Some friend. Friending that friend would rightfully make anyone else who wanted freedom and liberty for all to be cold, i.e. as in Cold War.

You can point to all kinds of things the US did wrong in Pakistan. But if you airbrush out of your analysis the fact that the Soviets KILLED ONE MILLION AFGHANS AND FORCED FIVE MILLION TO FLEE during their war, you are completely dishonest intellectually.

In the New Yorker piece, the author makes it seem as if Jimmy Carter somehow "lured" the Soviets into this war because he was happy to seem them "mired down" as the US had been in Viet Nam. It implies there was something the US could do to stop that war. Um, what would that be, a resolution at the UN Security Council?! The US role in funding the rebels was hardly significant -- like I said, ONE MILLION were killed. If the US were able to do more, obviously so many wouldn't have been killed. But it was pin-pricking the opposite nuclear power and never going to do much.

As recently declassified documents and White House tapes show, Nixon and Kissinger stood stoutly behind Pakistan’s generals, supporting the murderous regime at many of the most crucial moments. This largely overlooked horror ranks among the darkest chapters in the entire cold war.

Of course, no country, not even the United States, can prevent massacres everywhere in the world — but this was a close American ally, which prized its warm relationship with the United States and used American weapons and military supplies against its own people.

Nixon and Kissinger were not just motivated by dispassionate realpolitik, weighing Pakistan’s help with the secret opening to China or India’s pro-Soviet leanings. The White House tapes capture their emotional rage, going far beyond Nixon’s habitual vulgarity. In the Oval Office, Nixon told Kissinger that the Indians needed “a mass famine.” Kissinger sneered at people who “bleed” for “the dying Bengalis.”

They were unmoved by the suffering of Bengalis, despite detailed reporting about the killing from Archer K. Blood, the brave United States consul general in East Pakistan. Nor did Nixon and Kissinger waver when Kenneth B. Keating, a former Republican senator from New York then serving as the American ambassador to India, personally confronted them in the Oval Office about “a matter of genocide” that targeted the Hindu minority among the Bengalis.

After Mr. Blood’s consulate sent an extraordinary cable formally dissenting from American policy, decrying what it called genocide, Nixon and Kissinger ousted Mr. Blood from his post in East Pakistan. Kissinger privately scorned Mr. Blood as “this maniac”; Nixon called Mr. Keating “a traitor.”

All of this may well be true, but Bass must never have ready any other divulged Kissinger comments if he thinks this represents a special animus; Kissinger also infamously suggested that even if the Soviet Jews were killed in large numbers as in the Holocaust, it would not be a fight for the US due to Soviet nuclear power.

See, when a scholar like this cannot accept the reality of the massive crimes against humanity of the Soviets, their invasions of countries and coercive sphere of influence and their war in Afghanistan, then I find myself wishing for a second opinion. This scholar dismisses concerns about India's pro-Soviet leanings.

But these are real concerns. It doesn't matter if Nixon is cynical about them; they are real. They are about mass crimes against humanity and a bloody oppressive system that you deter, and do not let spread if you value freedom. Scholars like Bass don't have a feel for this reality.

I'm happy to remember what Nixon and Kissinger did in those horrible days if Prof. Bass will zoom out and remember what the Soviets did in their terrible days before and during this period.

Amy Goodman and Alan Nairn place the darkest hour in a different place -- Indonesia, and the massacre of East Timor by the generals backed by the US. It was their direct experience in those atrocities that set them up for a life-long career of anti-government activism and the creation of Democracy Now! which champions Manning and Snowden.

So for them, too, nothing exists but the sins of US pragmatism backing up this or that awful regime in the Cold War, but the back story to that -- the Soviet Union and the worst crimes against humanity -- never exist. It's those crimes that enabled both sincere and cynical reactions including the backing of autocratic regimes.

I could add that Amy, Jeremy Scahill and the rest of this crowd could care less when the US backs the Russian regimes, responsible for the massacres of tens of thousands -- hundreds of thousands -- of Chechens. And of course they were all MIA and preoccupied only with the one-sided peace-movement in the Soviet era and never did anything about the previous war in Afghanistan.

In openDemocracy recently, I argued that Bangladesh was the forgotten template for 20th century war. Long before the killings and mass rape that took place in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, Bangladesh showed what happens when militias allied to the army are involved in a conflict[4]. Although contemporary witnesses, including a number of US diplomats[5] were convinced that they were witnessing genocide[6] – that is the deliberate destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group; by the twenty first century, the conflict in Bangladesh had largely disappeared from international concern. A BBC website defining genocide, for instance, failed to include Bangladesh even among a list of possible genocidal campaigns. Since 1972, not a single human rights organisation has done any investigation of the conflict, although they have been harsh in their comments about the establishment of an international crimes tribunal to try alleged war criminals.

The Pakistan military, one of the chief perpetrators of the conflict, is out of reach of the Bangladeshi authorities. Nine men have been charged and numerous others, including at least two men resident in Western countries, are being investigated. All those charged are Bengalis. They are opposition leaders mostly of the Jamaat e Islami, a transnational fundamentalist political party, allied to the Muslim Brotherhood and often seen by Western governments as ‘moderate Islamists’. In Pakistan, in Britain and in the US, those accused of grave crimes enjoy almost complete impunity[7]. It is only in Bangladesh that there is an attempt at holding them accountable. A mass movement, conducted almost entirely by survivors of the genocide, and energised by a new generation of younger activists, made the trial of alleged war criminals a major issue in the last elections.

I'm not an expert on this region or these wars. I'm reading along with everyone else. But I see revisionism when I see the context of Soviet crimes against humanity and the genuine and legitimate reasons for the Cold War always left out. I'm happy to see wrong where wrong is done and don't have a problem joining in the condemnation of Nixon and Kissinger. But it's a one-sided story when it's only about them, and the Cold War is seen as merely an attempt at American hegemony instead of engendered by really serious crimes against humanity. If you don't make this part of the analysis, then you set up the next time when the crimes of communism or extremism or terrorism -- real an actual crimes -- are used to justify something the left finds wrong. Why can't the left be against both things?

The Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP),
R.Gil Kerlikowske meets Afghan and American officials at a dinner
held at the U.S Ambassadors residence on Feb 01, 2010. The third day
in Afghanistan, Kerlikwoske visited the Sanga Amaj Treatment Center
run by Social Services for Afghan Women (SSAW). This drug treatment
center is populated by Afghan women addicted to opiates and their
children that they bring to stay with them through-out their inpatient
treatment. Photo: US Embassy Kabul, 2010.

Insider attacks in Afghanistan continue to occur however but at a much reduced rate from 2012, according to a new Pentagon report.

There have been “nine insider attacks against ISAF thus far in 2013
compared to 35 during the same period in 2012″, the report notes.

Insider attacks risk “undermining international support for the
mission and long-term support for the Afghan government, which could
pose a threat to the transition process and stability beyond 2014.”

“The mitigation measures adopted by ISAF and the ANSF since the surge in attacks during summer 2012 appear to be making a difference, and to date, the rate of attacks against ISAF is significantly reduced. That said, these mitigation measures
continue to diminish ISAF resources and hamper movement, speed, and
activity on the tactical level. Attacks against the ANSF continue to
rise, however, and may continue to do so as the ANSF assume greater
responsibility for the security of Afghanistan”, according to a new
Defense Deaprtment report http://www.defense.gov/pubs/October_1230_Report_Master_Nov7.pdf).

More than 590,000 Afghans had been displaced
from their homes by fighting and Taliban threats by late August,
according to the United Nations, a 21% increase since January and more
than four times the number in 2006, when the insurgency began in
earnest. Wazira, who like many Afghans goes by one name, is one of more
than 12,000 displaced people from Wardak province alone who now share
homes around Kabul, according to the U.N.

U.N.
officials worry that widening violence could kick off an exodus abroad
when American-led forces leave the country next year.

For
those trying to leave Afghanistan altogether, the first stop often is
neighboring Iran or Pakistan. Some who are wealthy or lucky enough head
for Europe or Australia, which already is coping with an influx of
Afghan boat people. Some 38,000 people from Afghanistan have managed to
get into industrialized nations to apply for asylum last year, more than
from any other country, according to the U.N., and the highest figure
since the U.S. invasion in 2001.

The number of drug users in Afghanistan is estimated to be as high as
1.6 million, or about 5.3 percent of the population, among the highest
rates in the world. Nationwide, one in 10 urban households has at least
one drug user, according to a recent report from the Bureau of
International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. In the city of
Herat, it is one in five.

From 2005 to 2009, the use of opiates doubled, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime,
putting Afghanistan on par with Russia and Iran, and the number of
heroin users jumped more than 140 percent. Most drug experts think the
rate of drug use has only increased since then.

In a country troubled by adversity, from its long-running war to rampant
corruption, drug addiction ranks low among national priorities.
Government funding for treatment and outreach is less than $4 million a
year. There are just under 28,000 formal treatment slots available
nationwide, officials say, and such programs rely heavily on roughly $12
million a year in extra international funding for treatment.

The focus of the international community and the Afghan government has
instead been on reducing opium production. Since the beginning of the
war in 2001, the Americans have spent more than $6 billion to curb
Afghanistan’s opium industry, including eradication and alternative crop
subsidies. The effort has struggled, and in many areas eradication
efforts have been unofficially abandoned as too costly in terms of lost
public support for government.

This last article I almost missed because like a lot of people, I tend to read the news that other people have already pushed through links on Facebook and Twitter first, then on various email services next, and then only later go through to the actual pages of news sites I might have book-marked or in readers. I might even actually visit the front page of the New York Times electronic version, but perhaps a story isn't on the front page.

I only saw the story of the addicts because my aunt still gets the hard copy of the Times delivered to her home and I read it there. I keep discovering every other week how many things I've missed in the next pages, the back pages, the pages in between a link or a tweet.

I cite these stories because these are all functions of the Taliban, and our withdrawal.

So much revisionism goes on now -- just as with the Soviet era -- focusing on US killings of civilians or blaming the US. The Taliban has massacred 85% of the civilians killed in the war; Karzai and his allies the other 15%. ISAF is considered among Karzai's allies, but is responsible for a tiny fraction of the deaths.

10/12/2013

WikiLeaks barged into offices all over Central Asia, pressuring independent journalists like these reporters at the highly-respected Asia Plus to instantly sign agreements on WikiLeaks' terms to publish US cables about their country.Here Marat Mamadshoev and a colleague are being told to sign the agreement immediately, but decline.

This is my quick take upon first view of this video (so sorry if there are mistakes or names missing, they will be fixed). It's available for rent ($2.99) or pay $7.00 plus on Vimeo. Naturally, I'm unhappy that I had to give a dime to WL, which I oppose on principle -- and I have to wonder how it is that Paypal could agree to accept these payments when it has blocked payments directly from WikiLeaks (and I plan to raise this issue with both Vimeo and PayPal).

This piece of vile stuff is supposed to be Assange's attempt to provide an "antidote" to a movie about him coming out in theaters October 18 which he doesn't like called The Fifth Estate (it's too critical) which he trying to kill off in various ways.

Perhaps he's counting on the fact that most people don't know anything about Central Asia, and will merely be impressed that he and his merry band of hacksters caroming around the perilous but picturesque mountain roads of Central Asia -- complete with Soviet-style policeman stopping and searching traffic, tunnels under repair until who knows when, and lots of sheep blocking the road -- are the coolest of cypherphunk hipsters going on a " journalism" trip through dangerous territory.

So an unintended bonus is that with Wahlstrom narrating most of the film -- when the Great One Himself isn't butting in and pontificating -- is that WikiLeaks cannot claim anymore that Shamir and Son don't have anything to do with them and don't represent them. They most surely do, as this film proves.

Johannes is a Russian speaker because he likely grew up in Russia or at least speaking Russian with his father -- who has played a sordid role in the Snowden affair, too, about which you can read on my other blog, Minding Russia. But he and the other handlers or minders or whoever the hell they are really have no sense of this region, whatever their Russian language ability, and burst in aggressively -- and disgustingly -- to try to strong-arm local news media in dire straits in Central Asia, where there is a huge list of murdered, jailed, disappeared and beaten journalists, into publishing WikiLeaks cables.

Another bonus is that one of the Russian-speaking journalists on the tour admits openly that he fabricated stories at his job (supposedly because he felt himself to be pressured to do so by his bosses and their need to sell newspapers) and then was ultimately fired. This is just about the level of journalistic quality we can expect throughout this film.

(The reason I mixed up Wahlstrom and this Russian in an earlier version of this blog, since corrected is because both are accused of fabrications; the Russian admits it in the film, Wahlstrom denies it. And while some WikiLeaks operative @Troushers is accusing me of "lying" here in my summary of the dialogue of this Russian journalist, I stand by it -- indeed he openly admits he fabricated letters and indeed the implication is that he was pressured by his boss, who needed to sell papers even if he didn't say literally that phrase -- Internet kids are so literalist. The obvious reality is, the theme throughout the entire film is that editors and journalists in mainstream media only do things to sell newspapers -- i.e. the obvious point of the snarky portrayal of Bill Keller and Sulzberger talking about traffic for a column of Bill's "half supportive" of Obama. Here's the script verbatim from Dmitry Velikovsky, from Russkiy Reporter, who has been active in covering Manning's trial in the past. Russkiy Reporter also sponsored the showing of the film in Moscow.

Velikovsky: I began with some funny study. I was obliged to edit the column "letters of readers". But the problem was that there were absolutely no letters to edit. But the column should be published twice a day. And so I was obliged to to invent those letters me myself. And I just invented a lot of them.

Wahlstrom: did you get some, any letters at all from real readers?

Velikovsky: Yes we got some maybe three, four or five in two months but they were all containing some critics.

Wahlstrom: but these letters you didn't publish.

Velikovsky: I wanted to publish those letters in the factual content of the newspaper because I found it rather important to have some kind of self criticism. But our marketing department had no self criticism and they forbid me to publish it. So i invented letters about problems of veterans, problems of pensioners, problems of no matter whom. So that's how I became a journalist.

Cue tinkly music...

Astoundingly, this aggressive, beligerent crew have no sense of themselves in this film, so imbued are they with their self-righteousness, even as they beam in Julian Assange on Skype who instructs the locals how they are to treat this material.

It's very clear WikiLeaks has absolutely no interest in the substance of the local stories, they just want to collect partners -- or conversely, shame those potential partners who refuse to deal with them for various reasons by making them look like they are boot-licking lackeys of the United States.

They tape phone conversations with people that are rather sensitive -- like a journalist in danger discussing whether he should publish a story about somebody who wants to run a coup in Tajikistan (!) -- and we have no idea if the people involved were informed that these calls would be taped -- and included in the film.

The single most damaging aspect I've seen in this agitprop trash is that the utterly unsupported claim is made that the local press are paid by the US Embassy to print flattering things about the US in order to get the leaders and publics of these countries to bend over while the US uses them as a launching pad and staging area for their war in Afghanistan.

The WikiLeaks people are too ignorant and blinded by their anti-American ideology to understand that a) the US has no need for this because these countries have cooperated anyway b) these tyrants have their own interests in playing off the US against Russia and China c) it doesn't matter as the US is pulling out of Afghanistan next year anyway.

Now, I write as someone who for six years worked at EurasiaNet and Open Society Foundation and wrote critically about the US role in Central Asia, particularly about the severe human rights and humanitarian issues -- about which the US government was oftne silent -- and the issues around the Northern Distribution Network, the supply path to Afghanistan from Russia which enabled the US to bring non-lethal cargo to NATO troops.

I also worked in the past as a free-lancer for RFE/RL ("(Un)Civil Society" and "Media Matters") and never experienced any censorship -- I wrote and published directly to the site. I recall only instances when care was taken in covering mass demonstrations once in Ukraine to make sure that the article didn't incite people -- as RFE/RL has a history of being charged with causing uprisings, i.e. in the Hungarian revolution and invasion by Soviet troops. RFE/RL is funded by Congress, but it doesn't have overlords hanging over you as you write -- there is far more independent coverage there than anything you'd see at RT.com, the Kremlin-sponsored propaganda outlet or Al Jazeera.

I have no relationship whatsoever to the US government, so I am certainly qualified to say that this film is an unfair hatchet job on people in harm's way -- oh, so typical of WikiLeaks.

The film opens with the WikiLeaks crew rolling through the mountains with Mehrabanb Fazrollah of Pyandj, Tajikistan, born 18 October 1962, in the back seat of the car telling his story. He was held five years in Guantanamo about which you can read some here.

Through a series of astoundingly leading questions, broad innuendos or outright promptings, the WL gang incites Fazrollah into saying he really knew nothing of any military significance, and his jailing was all for nothing, and boy is he mad. I don't know anything of his case except what I've read in the papers, but the duplicitious smiles and repeating of what foreigners want to hear are very old stories to me from having traveled in this region (I haven't ever been in Tajikistan but I've spent years travelling to Russia and other countries and interviewing Tajiks outside of Tajikistan).

Assange claims bitterly that this poor fellow spent five years ""to find out about a couple of fucking refugees in Tajikistan".

Actually, that's not even what the cable said or even what the man in the film says. They said there were 100,000 refugees. This is relevant of course regarding the Northern Alliance and the Tajiks in Afghanistan. The fellow is charged with membership in the Islamic Movement of Tajikistan (IMT) allied with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group on the American list of terrorist organizations.

Sorry, but this is not nothing, these are real terrorism movements, even if supposedly in decline (like, you know, Al Shabaab was in decline and chased out of their stronghold when they hit Westgate Mall in Kenya?)

You would never know from Assange's sneers that this is a country that was in a civil war for years, that it had the highest number of journalists murdered -- some 50, nearly as many as Algeria, also in a civil war at the time, that these journalists were killed by Islamists because they were secular or visa versa because they were not approved Muslims killed by state security. The war is a complicated one but to pretend that terrorism and war isn't a factor here -- right next to Afghanistan -- is absurd.

This is of course the game, too, of the International Relations Realist school in Washington and elsewhere, who minimize terrorism and laugh it away as a fantasy of Pentagon planners. But the reality is that both are true -- real terrorist acts have occurred here and there are in fact real Islamists pressuring secular society including press, and there are also fake terrorists that the oppressive government thinks up to keep itself in power. And you know something? I surely do not trust Julian Assange and his crew of losers to tell the difference.

I will never forget in my life the terrified face of a Tajik journalist who had been receiving death threats that I helped rescue from Tajikistan in the 1990s -- and it was a brave man going the extra mile inside the US Embassy actually that got him and his family out of there.

In the film, after reading some cables on Gitmo -- and as I said, the cases may be innocent, but the WL goons are hardly the judge, and there are real complex problems of terrorism and pressure on secularism in these countries -- Assange and Wahlstrom sit and guffaw about a line in a memo they've found about Bildt getting in touch with Karl Rove instead of really trying to understand the complexities of the region They find this such a smoking gun and so "evil" that they roar for minutes, but we don't get the joke.

The translator asks outrageously leading questions and they all laughed and carried on and made it clear they sympathized with the Tajik taken from the battlefield from Gitmo and don't interview him impartially or critically at all. In the same way the pick up a memo from someone named Michael Owens, and start roaring about the US "empire of the 21st century" -- which is of course a rather lack-luster claim these days -- some empire of the 21st century which they are just now leaving, eh?

Then they read from cables -- only partially -- with a "scene-setter" -- talking about how the Tajiks have "unfailingly" allowed their overflights, which is all they really wanted from them. They then purport to read from a cable implying that these "imperialist Americans" in Dushanbe want to "make the local media more pro-American" and will first plant positive stories in the Russian media, then pay the local media to reprint them in the local press.

They don't actually cite from any document or give any source, and it isn't in any known cable from the WikiLeaks Cablegate already published that the US Embassy engages in this practice.

So without anything to bolster this claim, WikiLeaks smears gazeta.ru, Interfax, and Ekho Moskvy, claiming that they've somehow engaged in this practice.

It really is an outright lie. I have read the Russian-language press in this region for years. They are critical of the US and there aren't these glowing planted pieces they imagine. And the US doesn't need to engage in such a silly, crude practice.

Secondly, none of these papers in the region have very big readerships -- they don't have the capacity. We are talking about newspapers with 50,000 or 100,000 or 500,000 possibly at the most, but more at the low end. It's just not a way to reach people. Internet penetration is very low in some of the countries -- it's about 60% in Russia but drops down sharply as you go East.

The US already has Voice of America as an outlet to cover the perspectives of the US, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty which serves to enhance or enable struggling local media -- they have open partnerships with some local stations, and because they are far more independent than the official media of these authoritarian states, they have more credibility. To be sure, RFE/RL are not going to be radically antithetical to the foreign policy of the United States, any more than the BBC or Al Jazeera or RT.com. But unlike Al Jazeera and RT.com, RFE/RL really tries to cover critical local news without fear or favour, and proof of that is just how many journalists have been arrested, jailed or expelled over the decades. The US government doesn't need to crudely pay somebody to hide behind, in other words. But these, too, don't have a huge audience outside the intelligentsia in the big cities.

The fact is, WikiLeaks has not produced proof of this disreputable claim, because they've cited one cable only partially where it sounds like a proposal that one doesn't know was fulfilled, and in citing another cable, in Kyrgyzstan, it appears that the Kyrgyz foreign minister presents this idea, and that it doesn't come from the Americans.

To be sure, paid-for press and infomercials and advertorials are rampant in this region in the official and unofficial press. But to claim that these brave independent outlets take payments to portray te US nicely is just an outright smear for which there isn't an iota of proof. It puts these brave people in danger to suggest it.

05/07/2013

When you see deals like this, you have to wonder how serious America is about investing in the New Silk Road -- which is how the State Department describes the concept for "prosperity" in the Central Asian region after the withdrawal of US troops in 2014.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that "the New Silk Road" merely means NATO traffic and business through Afghanistan. It's also the rest of the old Silk Road of the ancient caravan-serai in the countries of Central Asia like Uzbekistan.

That's where South Korea has just signed a $3.9 billion deal to build a gas complex, according to trend.az:

Kogas signs agreement for $3.9 billion gas-chemical complex - Trend.az - The
Government of Uzbekistan and South Korean Korea Gas Corporation (Kogas)
signed a direct agreement on the construction of the Ustyurt Gas
Chemical Complex

Or look at China, which has $15 million just in Jizzak:

Chinese companies implement $15 million worth projects in Jizzak SIZ - Trend.az -Jizzak SIZ was created in March of this year according to the decree of the President of Uzbekistan.

I'm not suggesting that it's a good idea for American companies to invest in this region, given the corruption and massive human rights violations -- which in fact are not good for business, as the same corrupt institutions that violate people's civil rights to stay in power are the same ones that take bribes or suddenly confiscate your investment; they are intertwined.

GM sold 121,584 vehicles in Uzbekistan last year, making the
country the eighth-largest market for its Chevrolet brand. The
joint venture produced more than 225,000 cars last year and will
raise output to 250,000 units this year.

At one level, if it keeps the company in buiness, even if the jobs go to Uzbeks, it's a plus.

But on the other hand, the reality is, China, South Korea, even India are investing more in this region and apparently looking the other way when it comes to corruption and human rights problems that ultimately will haunt them. They are spending large amounts of money. And this is now a foreign policy fact of life which means that as the US "pivots" toward China for reasons I can never really grasp, they will find themselves with the harsh reality that the regions of the world that they think are "pacified" or "taking care of themselves" or merely "withdrawn from" are what are being Asia's powerhouse.

And maybe the job is just to provide a bulwark to Central Asian leaders -- who in the long term may become better as the tyrants age out -- so they have choices besides being taken over by China -- and of course, have a hedge against Russia, which has also had its failures in a region increasingly turning anti-Moscow:

Not every foreign investor has met with success in
Uzbekistan. Russia's top mobile phone operator, MTS,
which trades on the New York Stock Exchange, has written off
$1.1 billion after its Uzbek licence was permanently revoked on
Aug. 13.

There's a certain lobbying force in the US which seems to be over-friendly to dictators -- and gets its way despite the objectsions of human rights groups and even others in government. Says the Asia Times:

It was reported that the American business
delegation, headed by Carolyn Lamm, chairwoman of
the American-Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce
(AUCC), and including representatives of over 30
US companies such as Boeing, Solar Turbines,
General Motors, Merk, General Electric Energy,
Anadarko, Zeppelin International, Case New
Holland, Nukem and others, attended the business
forum.

Lamm is former head of the American Bar Association and you wonder why she doesn't get more challenge from her colleagues in the ABA, but then, the ABA is not really a human rights organization but a vehicle to expend USAID money for "training" that usually enriches US contractors.

Senior Uzbek government officials
in charge of the economic sector, including
ministers of finance, the economy, foreign
economic relations, investments and trade and
other high level officials, were also in
attendance to brief their guests on the state of
Uzbek economy and to discuss possible investment
and economic cooperation.

The forum has
been very successful, according to Uzbekistan's
National News Agency, as the two sides reached
understanding on 21 economic and investment
projects covering areas such as machinery, metal
processing, energy, oil and gas mining,
petrochemicals, electrotechnical processes,
uranium mining, pharmaceuticals, and others, with
a total value of US$2.8 billion.

Obviously, if the total value of US projects here is $2.8 billion, that doesn't even equal one project from South Korea noted above.

Fozil Mashrab at the Asia Times last year interestingly said that Uzbekistan's "look East" policy seeking investment from places like South Korea or Malaysia was only a function of Western reticence, given that the West suspended ties with Uzbekistan after the Andijan massacre, when hundreds of people were gunned down by Uzbek troops for protesting injustices in 2005 after an opposition jail-break in which police were killed.

But even though the US restored ties and even some forms of military aid, subject to review, it hasn't stopped the "look East" policy in fact, which I think was never going anywhere.

05/05/2013

Why does the Russia media print stuff like this speculating that the US is about to go to war with Kyrgyzstan?!

If you ever wonder why Eurasian exchange students and new immigrants in America acquire the views they do, ponder the media they read all their lives, were satured with, and still read and believe -- it's filled with deliberate lies and tendentious bullshit endlessly inciting hatred and suspicion.

The Kremlin is the worst of the provocateurs in this business, and the old Soviet disinformation and "agents of influence" apparatus was never dismantled. (Yes, the Daily Mail with its fake story about Saudi reports of involvement in the Boston bombing is right up there with the disinformation, but in their case, it's about sensations to sell newspapers; in the Kremlin's case, it's a state policy to lie and distract.)

The way these pieces always work there is "plausible deniability" because the Russian outlet is always citing an "expert" from one of the many state-sponsored think-tanks, or even a "Western expert" from among their likeminded networks, or even "sources" close to the government.

Today, the Russian wire service regnum.ru, which seldom departs from the official Moscow line, has a story with the headline "Plane Crash: US May Declare Kyrgyzstan as 'Outlaw' and Bring in Forces: Opinion," citing Kirill Stepanyuk, a commentator from comment.kg

Washington may declare Kyrgyzstan a country of a unrestrained terrorism and introduce US troops into the republic. We cannot forget that for the USA, Central Asia is a strategically important region and now there is the urgent issue of the withdrawl from Kyrgyzstan of the American military base, the same base from which the plane that crashed took off.

The Times published a picture of the crash site yesterday and quoted US officials as saying the reason for the crash and the status of the five crew members was still not known.

The Times cited an eyewitness who said that local authorities blocked off the site:

The news agency cited a local official, Daniyar Zhanykulov, a deputy
head of a Kyrgyz political party, who said that the open parachute was
on the ground near the site, but that police officers and firefighters
found no sign of the crew.

“It’s a horror, what’s happening,” Mr. Zhanykulov said, according to the
report. “There are no signs of people. The prosecutor and police
blocked off the area. And the rubble of the plane is burning. This is a
mountain area, and fire trucks cannot work.”

But according to the Russian "specialist" at comment.kg it was all different:

Really, in the first minutes after the plane crash, there was contradictory information with regard to the fact that at the site of the crash of the fuel plane, neither brigades from the Emergency Ministry nor police and even ambulances were allowed near the sight. Supposedly the territory was surrounded by American military." Whether that was true or not will hardly be able to be established since practically immediately followed a rebuttal of this information. If you reason logically, the Americans learned about trouble on board the fuel plane immediately and after they got an SOS signal likely sent their military people to the fallen liner.

Of course, it's possible US troops got to a plane that had just taken off from their base a few minutes earlier than local first-responders but I think more than just the American side of this story has to be questioned.

This crash follows a crash in Afghanistan in which 7 people on board a plane were killed after taking off from Bagram, and "no enemy activity" was reported in the area. Naturally, two planes like this crashing in the same week seems like sabotage, and yet, given the rush with which the US is trying to get troops out of Afghanistan and all the ensuing difficulties, fatigue and nerves and the negligence that comes with them could also be part of the background to these accidents. Or they could just be accidents.

I don't recall an American military plane ever crashing before in Kyrgyzstan, given the probably thousands of flights that have come out of that based during the Afghan war. Kyrgyzstan is like other post-Soviet countries with quite a few plane crashes in its record, but this was a plane piloted by Americans from their base, presumably.

This Russian story is not above trying to fan the flames of in fact non-existent ethnic hatred toward Kyrgyz, merely because the Boston bombers happen to have been born in Kyrgyzstan, as Chechens in the diaspora, although they left more than 10 years ago. Kyrgyzstan appears to have little to do with the Tsarnaev family, other than the fact that Tamerlan Tsarnaev managed to hang on to a Kyrgyz passport and use it to travel to Dagestan undetected supposedly even by Dagestani officials - a story that I think needs more research and more explanation -- and those implying that questions and criticisms here are about the Kyrgyz ethnos should knock it off, as it's about the Kyrgyz government, often pressured by Russia, and that's about something different.

As eyewitnesses describe, the fuel plane began to disintegrate in mid-air and exploded at a height of about two kilomters. Kowing that the USA will contrive to draw some advantage even from terrorist attacks, even in this story some underwater rocks may suddenly appear. Not so long ago, after the explosions in Boston, in the USA the question began to be hyped at length athat the death-dealing "pressure cookers" were prepared by natives of Kyrgyzstan, the brothers Tsarnaev."

This is fake, as there isn't a single news story in the American press, even in tabloids that sensationalized the story like the Daily News, claiming these were "Kyrgyz" -- it was always explained even for the geography-challenged American public that these were Chechens who happened to be born in Kyrgyzstan and left. Kyrgyzstan has as much to do with this story as the Seven Eleven chain store where the bombing suspects bought their Doritos and Red Bull, breakfast of champions.

Stepanyuk went on to say that the Americans "most likely will not miss a chance" to claim that a missile downed the plane (although there is no such claim) and that they are "capable" of even "sacrificing a plane" for this purpose (and of course the people on it, which of course is an outrageous implication).

"Washington may declare Kyrgyzstan an outlaw country of unbridled terrorist and introduce their forces into the republic."

American troops are there already on the base, of course, but there's absolutely nothing like that implied by US officials or even intimated by the big critics of the US involvement in this region.

EurasiaNet is back to putting falcons on the front page in a week of plane crashes and suspects in the Boston bombing tied to this region, they've either run out of copy or they've decided that this sort of "costumes and colourful objects" folk approach to the region is just the sort of "human interest" their readers are looking for -- presumably because they don't get enough of it from National Geographic.

03/31/2013

This is my little blog on Tajikistan that comes out on Saturdays. If you are unable to click on all the links, come to my blog Different Stans as these can be blocked by some mail systems.
Write me at catfitzny@yahoo.com with comments or requests to be added to
the mailing list.

o Opposition Leader Missing Abroad...o ...And Government Critic Missing at Homeo Russians Leaving Tajikistan in Droves...o...and Tajik Migrants Returning from Russia in Coffinso Everybody Worries About the Tajik Porous Border...o...But at Least OSCE Tries to Do Something About It

o Earthquake...and Harlem Shakes...

COMMENT

People explain the missing opposition leader abroad and the missing region critic at home by the same factor: the forthcoming presidential election coming up in November of this year. Why it's necessary to disappear people, when you're going to sail through to an overwhelming victory with the same dubious high percentage for the win as all your Central Asian neighbours is beyond me, but perhaps that one tug on the thread unravels the whole thing...

What I think people need to understand about disappearances is that you don't have to be an exemplary citizen or innocent of crime to claim the right to security and life that your state should not take away from you. In Belarus, the Lukashenka regime has been charged with disappearing mafia kingpins along with opposition leaders, using the same methods, and of course in Russia, some 400 people in missing in the North Caucasus even by official admission. So it's not good wherever it happens and the Tajik government needs to explain what's going on.

Paul Goble covers the exodus of Russians from Tajikistan, a process that has been going on steadily and in large numbers since the civil war. From far-away Brighton Beach, I can anecdotally report that for the first time talking to Russians who work as home attendants or have "khom-atten" that there are Tajiks now reported among the many former Soviets fleeing the region. When there is a Tajik restaurant in New York City, I guess we'll know there is more serious migration. Arkady Dubnov says that Russian language isn't declining because Tajik migrants need it to speak in the near abroad, starting with Russia, where they seek work. And some meet tragic ends, as we are reminded once again just how many return in coffins after being murdered in hate crimes or dying on unsafe construction sites.

Let us think of the most OSCE extreme sports -- the Afghan-Tajik border patrol training in the winter and...the Minsk Group meetings in the summer. OSCE tries the patience of the saints who persist with it. Everyone talks about the porous Tajik border, and a video of a precarious plane flight over it (see link below) lets you know that it's porous, but, well, not so navigable. Even so, there is expected to be trouble after US troops withdraw, and OSCE is at least trying to train some local people to address the challenges. It seems like training for a few dozen people can't make much of a difference, but as the saying goes, it matters to the starfish....

Early on March 15, a 58-year-old man put on his tracksuit and left
home in Qurghonteppa, a 90-minute drive south of Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s
capital. Morning exercise was a regular part of his routine, says
Amnesty International. But on this morning the man, a prominent critic
of President Imomali Rakhmon, did not return.

Friends and political allies fear Salimboy Shamsiddinov was kidnapped
for his political views, including his critique of Tajik-Uzbek
relations. Shamsiddinov, head of the Society of Uzbeks of Khatlon
Province, is no stranger to tough talk, often expressing himself freely
on politics and interethnic relations in a country where questioning the
official line is discouraged, especially in an election year.

«We looked into this theory as well. No kidnapping has taken place. Shamsiddinov has, himself, left the house and disappeared. We’ve received neither information of him having been beaten or forcefully taken out of his home nor any sign of kidnapping and this case must not be interpreted as “political”,» added E. Jalilov.

Global Voices points out that while disappearance of Umarali Quvvatov in Dubai is discussed, nobody seems to care about disappearance of Shamsiddinov within the country:

Over the last ten days, journalists and internet users in Tajikistan have actively discussed the ‘disappearance’ of a Tajik opposition leader
from a Dubai-based detention center. Meanwhile, they have largely
ignored another recent disappearance of an outspoken critic of the
regime within the country itself. Salim Shamsiddinov, 58, has been missing since he left his house in the southern city of Qurghonteppa early in the morning on March 15.

For GV, Quvvatov is tarnished by his association with the fuel business, but not for many Tajiks:

Despite commanding some support, Quvvatov, as a once-successful
businessmen, also has his doubters in the country. Before appearing as
an ardent opponent of Rahmon, Umarali Quvvatov was a successful
entrepreneur, the head and founder of two private companies that
transported oil products to Afghanistan through Tajikistan. Quvvatov
claims that his share in these businesses was taken by force by
Shamsullo Sohibov, the son-in-law of the president.

However, the majority of internet users in Tajikistan seem to support
him. Quvvatov has also attracted some followers due to his religious
views. In one of the interviews that he gave [ru]
to RFE/RL's Tajik service, Quvvatov described himself as a “Sufi”,
practicing the tradition that focuses on the “esoteric” dimension of
Islam. In Tajikistan, Sufis are popularly known as “pure Muslims”, which
partly explains the support for Quvvatov among some religious people.

The ethnic
Russian community in Tajikistan has declined in size from more than 400,000 in
Gorbachev’s time to about 40,000 now, the smallest number of ethnic Russians in
any CIS country except Armenia, a trend that has had a major impact on the
internal life of that Central Asian country and on its relations with Moscow.

But according to Arkady Dubnov, a
Moscow commentator, the situation with regard to Russian language knowledge
there is somewhat better, largely because of the continuing impact of
Soviet-era patterns and the more than 700,000 Tajiks who have gone to work in
the Russian Federation

Each day an average of three Tajiks return from Russia in simple
wooden coffins. They are the victims of racist attacks, police
brutality, dangerous working conditions and unsafe housing.

They go for the money, earning up to four times more in Russia than they would at home – if they were lucky to find a job in in dirt-poor Tajikistan. “They are saving to get married and build a house,” said Rustam Tursunov, deputy mayor of the western town of Tursunzoda.

In 2010, Rustam Khukumov was sentenced to almost 10 years in a
Russian prison, charged, along with three other Tajik nationals, with
possessing nine kilos of heroin.

Khukumov is the son of the powerful head of Tajikistan’s railway
boss, Amonullo Khukumov. The senior Khukumov is an ally and relative of
the Tajik strongman, President Emomali Rakhmon (Khukumov is
father-in-law to Rakhmon’s daughter). Could that have anything to do
with why the Khukumov scion was released early, under murky
circumstances, only a year into his jail term?

For asking that question, the weekly “Imruz News” now owes Khukumov over $10,500 in “moral damages,” a Dushanbe court ruled on February 25. The paper vows to appeal, which means more embarrassing attention on Khukumov.

As EurasiaNet.org's David Trilling (@dtrilling) about this situation, "Look what's just across the porous and poorly secured border from Tajikistan":

For years, Badakhshan Province enjoyed life away from the action, an
island of stability as war engulfed the rest of Afghanistan. But as the
broader conflict winds down, the northeastern province is offering a
bleak view of the future.

That's because NATO last year handed over security duties in Badakhshan
exclusively to the Afghan National Army (ANA) and National Police (ANP),
but the transition has coincided with a spike in violence and increased
militant activity.

Amb. Susan Elliott, our envoy in Dushanbe, is not dancing like our US ambassador to Uzbekistan, George Krol, last year -- she's more serious.

But does this picture, well...sort of say something about US-Tajik relations? It belongs to the Soviet genre of "bread and salt celebration" photos that are an iconic staple for the region's media. But this more impromptu Twitter version can't help evoking a little bit more beyond the rituals. There's that studied indifference to her menial task -- or glassy-eyed boredom? -- of the young woman in front, and the faint half-smile of the one toward the back; and the very faint frown from the ambassador herself, which could be a wince from having to taste some kumys sort of thing -- although that grass looks yummy...

Lest you think women are only pressed into their bread-salt routine, here's a photo of women in Khorog described as "fantastic entrepreneurs" by our ambassador. Of course, it's the usual "women's work" of embroidery or sewing, from the looks of it, but that's a start...

Joining in the worldwide craze, Tajiks have turned in at least four Harlem Shakes: here, by the Tajik Debaters' Society, illustrating that without the props of the rich world, as in other Shakes around the world, the students have been ingenuous with tape and paper and bags; here, sort of a partial Harlem Shake in Tajik national dress; here, which may be the only Harlem Shake performed in chapans by menu.tj; and here, by crazy dudes, which may get the vote for "most minimalist Harlem shake, anywhere".

A village on the Afghan-Tajik border on the banks of the Amu Darya River, 16 October 2008. Photo by Kate Dixon for OSCE.

The OSCE Office in Tajikistan hosted an extracurricular day for 30
Afghan and Tajik students from the faculties of Engineering and Natural
Sciences at universities in Dushanbe. The event is part of an initiative to strengthen co-operation on
hydrology and environment between Afghanistan and Tajikistan in the
Upper Amu-Darya River basin.

Twenty-four officers from of the Tajik Border Troops, Customs Service
and the Interior Ministry worked on evaluating context and potential
risks, identification, analysis and classification of risks, and risk
assessment at airport and land borders. The course was delivered by
serving police and border police officers from Turkey and the former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia

Afghan students and their instructors take part in a high-altitude
training exercise in preparation for two weeks of winter training on
survival, mountaineering, search and rescue, avalanche awareness, and
snow analysis in Khoja Obigarm, 50 kilometers north of Dushanbe, 12
February 2013. Photo by Mansur Ziyoev

On the one hand, the working group found that there are no formal
barriers to obtaining key documents or to public access to policy and
regulatory decision-making processes. At the same time, there is no
legal framework to facilitate public scrutiny and involvement, nor
practical mechanisms to place information in the public domain. In
practice, the lack of formal procedures makes meaningful public debate
or oversight of the sector all but impossible.

Once again, we're supposed to take cynicism as a substitute for insight, and we're supposed to see penetrating wisdom in the commonplace phenomenon that yeah, people are idealistic and don't ground themselves in RealPolitik -- and then the junior analysts of IR can pronounce them as stupid -- too stupid to know what they want or know how to get it.

Oh, this posture that people are poorly informed, sloppy researchers, naive, or confused -- instead of simply moral.

It's like a textbook case of, "Nizi ne mogut, a verkhi ne khotyat," as Lenin cynically said about the pre-revolutionary period and revolution: "Those at the botton can't, and those at the top, won't," i.e. reform, or make revolution. Oh, and that's why they need that advanced guard, that guiding intellectual Party elite, see.

Here's the thing about film festivals and the drones thing in general -- they are emotional, and the topic is emotional, and it's about morality and moral feelings -- and that's okay because drones throw up real moral issues of:

o secrecy

o claims of precision that are uncheckable due to secrecy

o fears of greater power due to claims of precision

Foust always behaves in a magnetic moral context as if all the magnet filings are going in the wrong direction and it's all their fault.

But there's really nothing wrong with people protesting drones, as such, although both in Pakistan and the US, it is a totemic symbol of American power used in political movements for their own purposes.

I wonder if Foust really understands that when he hears the facile and ready anti-Americanism and hysteria about drones in Pakistan, and the call to build schools and hospitals instead of throwing drones (as he heard from the Yemen activist that he mercilessly bullied on Twitter the other day), that this is placebo politics -- it's a surrogate. In an odd way, for this generation, for these people, this American-hating is a placebo for the critique they really ought to have (and do have, in an inchoate way) for their own oppressive and abusive and kleptocratic governments which are busy helping terrorists in some ways.

There's this, too: it's just no good telling off Pakistanis and others at a human rights film festival that no, it's not a violation of sovereignty because they were invited in because they weren't part of that voluntary process. And wait, has he no sense of resonance in this region and with history? That's what the Soviets said about the tanks coming into Afghanistan or before that, Prague or Budapest. They were invited in to help save the socialist order.

Even if there is indeed a world of difference between Soviet tanks and American drones and the inviting process is more, shall we say, fluid, the fact is, Pakistan is not a democracy; people in it did not get to chose; the parliamentary doesn't have power over the military; all this is obvious. Why talk about "inviting" in a setting where clearly some political forces didn't get to participate democratically in that decision, and some feel marginalized by the process?

Leave aside the issue of whether it would be "good for the country" to have more drones kill more terrorists in an undemocratic way and oh, maybe hasten demoracy that way, as an engineering proposition. The fact is, it doesn't sound like a persuasive argument, and there has to be some sensitivity to this.

You have to wonder why the organizers invited Foust. Do they like getting lashed?!

The other day I was talking to a colleague from the establishment human rights movement, so to speak, who was trying earnestly to make the case for drones as in fact a new kind of human rights instrument because it is more and more precise and after all, that's what we should work toward with international humanitarian law (IHL), the laws of war -- precision, which means less casualities.

That struck me as a technocratic argument of the sort we hear about everything now all the time, especially with the Internet.

But, before that, there was always a debate between whether the proper subject of the human rights movement was even IHL or should stick only to human rights. No one remembers this any more, but it is worth recalling that there were some strong voices saying that the human rights movements should stick to human rights, and not get into the laws of war or crimes because those issues were better parsed by law-enforcers and militaries -- and of course the ICRC -- because they involved first suppressing what might be an act of conscience opposing war in the first place.

I kept saying that the remoteness of the control over the missiles was creepy and seemed a matter of conscience. My colleague kept saying, but the weapons are more precise now and don't cause as much collateral damage.

But here's the thing about all this then: they are secret, and housed in the CIA. And not "just because"; but precisely as a function of their precision. That is, precisely because they are precise, the information about them has to be wrapped up very tight to remain successful. There was just this unfortunate habit of terrorists hanging out in their home compounds with the whole family.

The other day I was listening to a "progressive" talk radio program dissecting the Rand Paul filibuster and rallying for Obama. One woman called in and spoke fautously of how people who wouldn't agree to Obama's budget should be arrested for "obstruction of justice" -- as if that's what it meant. She had the determined and matter-of-fact ire of someone who wasn't quite educated enough to know that the meaning of the phrase wasn't quite what she wanted (and Foust approaches all human rights activists as being like that woman). Yet despite all that, she had an essential point, from her perspective as an Obama voter -- if the president won, why can't he do what he wants?

Then a man called in whose son was a drone pilot. He described his son as "flying the planes" even though he was located in the United States and not physically flying them there. But he said, "But it's still flying the planes". There were people in Afghanistan or Pakistan who did the ground work and scoped out the area, of course. Then the people who "flew the planes" from the US. He said so much expense, care, training and precision! -- went into this that it would be "inconceivable" that it would be misused on somebody sitting in a cafe in San Francisco.

We're told that people who "fly the planes" even from thousands of miles away like this still get post-traumatic stress syndrome from killing people. But really, what's the difference between 30,000 feet up in the air, and 3,000 miles away? You're still looking at an electronic dashboard nowadays and you can't see what you hit? So shouldn't we accept this as "better" because it's more precise?

Again, the secrecy and housing within the CIA then is the problem -- it has less oversight then from Congress, and victims can't be compensated as they are when the military accidently kills them in ordinary bombings.

A band of eager lawyers and technologists who want to prove that war is "better" because it is more precise now perhaps make a more humane military, if you will, or they make a civil society of sorts that acts perhaps as a brake on military that might want to do things with less precision or expense, let's say. Foust would like to turn the human rights organizations into something like this -- appendages of the military with troubled looks on their faces about "going to far" but essentially getting with the program.

But it shouldn't then be called a human rights movement of conscience -- and that's okay to have, because in the face of the technologists, they have to say: but it's secret, so we don't know; but that kid was killed, so we're not sure.

It's not just the secrecy -- itself dictated by that very precision. It's then the psychological and political impact on other countries. Sure, corrupt governments whip up anti-American sentiment and weak oppositions faced with vicious persecution and even death convert their positions into anti-American placebos. But ordinary people, too, then begin to get caught up in the sense of feeling helpless and pinned by stronger, more precise, more deadly force out there.

We saw what resonance the #StandwithPaul stuff had on Twitter and even in the real world, and how people could somehow come to see that maybe, really, they could be sitting in a cafe in San Francisco, and...

If that much agitation could come just from the *thought* of such a situation, and the reality of only two cases of American citizens, imagine if you were in a setting where thousands of people were killed that way, and you didn't know if maybe hundreds of them weren't militants but were just kids or women and old men. Such it's a psychological situation, if nothing else, and one meriting sympathy.

Foust could only sniff:

A similar mindset afflicted the panel on Afghanistan, where outrage overpowered reason. Jawed Taiman’s documentary
about Afghans’ views of the future was done very well, but the audience
was raucous and bordered at times on hostile. Panelists and audience
members alike blamed everything on America, on Pakistan, or on the
military. Most said that Afghanistan would be just fine once the
foreigners leave – a conclusion many Afghans don’t share.

Really? But the link is to a New York Times article about "strivers" and a budding "middle class" -- certainly a thin concept in Afghanistan where most people are poor. Those people have not been better off with NATO troops there for the last ten years; it just didn't work in a lot of places. That's not to suggest the Taliban and company are better, but the reason we're leaving is that we have to concede it didn't work.

@DaveedGR@joshuafoust Nobody can take the moral ground simply; it is always viewed as a "luxury" by those not in power. That's nonsense tho

I always come back to that Bonfire of the Vanities insight:

Where is the poet who has sung of that most lacerating of all human emotions, the cut that never heals -- male humiliation?

While precision should in theory make the ordinary man more secure that he won't be caught up in a mass conflagration and the enemy is only going to target the bad guys very selectively, the government can exploit the "eye in the sky" fears that come with that precision.

Then the precision perhaps might be the very trigger of his immense feeling of helplessness and therefore greater anger.

This is about culture, and psychology and group dynamics, and I have a feeling that even the "human terrain" expert Joshua Foust isn't really good at navigating these things because the RealPolitik is too captivating. Who wouldn't want to be the president's aide instead of the injured child?

03/06/2013

Gen. Petraeus meets President Karimov in Tashkent in 2009. Photo: US Embassy in Tashkent.

Sarah Kendzior has a perfectly dreadful article posted on AlJazeera where she is a frequent contributor. "Does it matter if the West gives military aid to Uzbekistan?" she asks, sucking a thumb that she has turned up in fact for military aid because she's never seriously questioned it. She and the other gaggle of former defense analysts at Registan.net generally support the status quo of US policy -- and that means supporting these regimes, albeit with occasional criticism for credibility's sake -- because we need them to get in and out of the war in Afghanistan.

AlJazeera has a skewed view of the world tilting to the anti-American, pro-Palestinian, "progressive" line that dovetails with Kendzior's crowd -- and they censor or just don't cover stories. I had never known them to censor comments that were legitimate, i.e. not spam or obscene, but for some reason, I saw my comment disappear, and then when I tried to respond to Richard Szulewski, I couldn't post.

I have a few articles in the queue of Kendzior's I've been meaning to sit down and analyze for their flaws in thinking and bad faith, but I put it off until I have the time to really sit for hours and think and analyze line-by-line -- I find most people who have swallowed her line whole need a very careful rebuttal line-by-line or they won't even think of resisting her -- that is if they bother to pay attention in the first place. She is not well known in the fields of either anthropology for Eurasia or in the field of communications or Central Asian studies but she is aggressively making herself known by Twitter, the conference circuit and blogging -- which pass for scholarship these days.

Her article is a stupendous circle-jerk of thinking, as she links to her own piece in argument ("Stop Talking About Civil Society"); then she links to her fellow believers around Registan and Joshua Kucera, a like-minded comrade from EurasiaNet who turned in an awful piece back in 2011 in the New York Times that said "say and do nothing" about human rights because you can't influence Central Asia anyway. It really was pernicious, and seemed to serve the interests of those on the Hill and at State trying to get the Senate Appropriations committee to drop sanctions on Uzbekistan so they could get some modest military help which was a way of papering over a poor relationships and trying to keep the NDN going. An awful business, and Kucera even took a factoid handout from State later, that no one else got, and published it as evidence that State didn't think human rights progress was necessary really anyway, for exigency factors, even though before, they'd postured about progress as if it *was* necessary to convince reluctant senators concerned about human rights implications. Like I said, a bad business...

But Kendzior's arguments are attractive to the do-nothing RealPolitik crowd, so it's worth thinking them through.

Association for Human Rights in Central Asia proposes siging a petition against military aid. I signed it. Kendzior signed it too but she takes a pirouette to tell us she did it as a matter of private conscience, even if as a public intellectual and thinker, she doesn't believe in it. Way to show your hypocrisy, Sarah. And no need to bother.

Says Kendzior:

Analysts have long debated the ethical and strategic ramifications of providing Uzbekistan with military equipment - largely unidentified but allegedly non-lethal - in exchange for a transport route to neighbouring Afghanistan. But the heated discussion that has emerged has more to do with the moral anxiety of Westerners than with the rights or safety of Uzbeks.

What is intended as activism rooted in a critique of Western
militarism actually amounts to an endorsement of Western effectiveness,
because it rests on the belief that the West has leverage, that our
opinion matters, that the fate of nations hinges on us. The hard truth
is that in places like Uzbekistan, it does not.

Well, that's supposed to mean that we ought not debate, because hard-assed authoritarians are going to be brutal anyway. Well, why not? We can move the slider up and down on this, surely. I will never forget a retiring general of the NDN who said at a conference that he told Petraeus and others that the US shouldn't have prostrated so much to Karimov. We shouldn't have. And neither should Kendzior. And that *is* what she does when she coldly and nastily tells every human rights activist they don't matter and therefore should do nothing, as if their advocacy is merely some bourgeois affectation of blinded Western imperialists who don't realize the evils of their own country or its clients (which is a line that plays nicely into the ALJ narrative).

Yes, it's important to call out public figures' immorality when they get too clever by half. It is immoral.

In fact, it *does* matter. Uzbekistan is avidly trying to keep us as friends so that it doesn't have to go into the arms of Russia and China only. It wants its independence from the former and doesn't want to become dependent on the latter. Oh, and Turkey, too. So they like dealing with the US in terms of business and military matters as it gives them some options and choices. We can exploit that to try to get concessions on political prisoners or terms of how we *are* going to prostrate ourselves which is *not that much*. We should always and everywhere call out the Uzbek regime's bluff -- they claim they need help with terrorism and will be cooperate with the war effort in Afghanistan because of that need? Okay, be helpful then.

But other than a few token political prisoner releases, what the US has gotten is only more expulsions of its own funded projects, and US-based non-governmental groups like Human Rights Watch have been expelled. So that prompts Kendzior to her hard-nosed, callused view of how to see this situation -- which comes straight out of Karimov's vision of himself:

And that is the point. Despite the changing relationship between the
West and Uzbekistan, the brutality of the Karimov government has
remained consistent, impervious to Western influence or Western demands.
Uzbekistan's government will do what it wants regardless of how it
hurts itself or others. There is no carrot and no stick, only cruel,
cold dismissal.

Well, yes and no. Lots of Uzbeks still want to come to the US to study -- and do so and eventually they will grow up and some of them might have some influence on events in their country. Some of them got in political trouble even with very mild educational programs and were forced to remain here -- Kendzior and Registan in fact adopted them. They openly discuss life after Karimov, who will not live forever. So cold or not, cruel or not, dismissal or not, water wears away the stone, exiles discuss, they interact with dissenters inside the country, alternatives are created, the US funds foreign broadcasting, support some NGOs abroad, provides aslyum for some fleeing -- and an alternative political and civic space is made. Certainly more of a political space than would exist if we put Sarah Kendzior in charge of civil society, which she repudiates and says we should stop talking about.

Citing herself, Kendzior discounts that any chaos is coming:

The debate over military aid arrives among speculation that the
departure of NATO forces from Afghanistan in 2014 will leave Central
Asia in chaos, an outcome predicted by severalanalysts. This argument assumes that the NATO presence played a significant role in achieving regional stability, a view I disputed in a recent article showing how Central Asian "peace" is structured on citizens' fear of their own governments.

Well, except, she can't be sure. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. And they didn't predict the Andijan uprising and massacre, the Arab Spring and crackdown, the big marches in Russia and crackdown, and so on. If we left it up to these armchair anthropologists that farm out their own surveys to others and don't visit the country to work (and maybe they can't), we wouldn't know anything about unrest in these societies and would be utterly prepared for various scenarios. Oh, I guess we do that a lot, then. But...You have to keep an open mind. Kendzior does not have one. She keeps hammering the same RealPolitik message home as if somebody's budget depends on it. And probably somebody's budget does, and I don't mean her university's.

Kendzior believes ANY talk about possible terrorism or militarism and unrest are just ridiculous. That's insane! This is an area that *does* have some instances of terrorism, even if some are manufactured. There are something like 8,000 Muslim prisoners in jail. Many of them were wrongfully jailed, and that means their relatives are held down only by fear and intimidation -- and that may not last forever, like it didn't last forever in Egypt where people were tortured. We have to care, and we have to develop ways of engaging the regime while in power, those people if they are released and come to power, and everyone else.

She then claims that Akrimaya "didn't exist". But I've heard Uzbek exiles speak openly of its existence as a fact including some that took part in it -- and by that they don't mean some terrorist operation like Al Qaeda, but a Muslim businessmen's society. Here's what I said on ALJ in case it is removed:

It isn't so material to determine whether Akromiya is "real" or not, i.e. was it a fundamentalist Islamist group bent on terror. It was a group of Muslim businessmen who helped each other. And they went to break their fellow businessman out of jail because they thought his jailing on charges of corruption was unfair, and knowing the lack of due process in that country, that is likely. But then they killed policemen and took others as hostages and then human shields as they faced down government troops. So they committed violence, that's wrong, that's illegal, and the human rights groups protesting this massacre always seem to skip over that part way too lightly. Yes, there seemed to have been a lot of women and children who peacefully gathered in the square who were then mowed down by government troops. But government tanks and troops can rationalize their massive human rights violations when the incidents are started by gunmen doing a jail break and a shoot-out, you know?

I think it's the right thing to do not to sell this government lethal weapons. We will not pry them loose from Russia or help them fight terrorism by doing that. Once troops are removed from Afghanistan, we should not be so craven to them. We should attempt to engage them with a series of incremental steps and if they reform or make concessions, adjust our behaviour accordingly.

What's so awful about Kendzior's ideas is that she winds up with an unjustified quietism and endorsement of the status quo -- the authoritarian regime about which we should do nothing because we have no leverage.

But what happens when you mount academic theses that unrest can "never
happen here" or that Islamic fundamentalism "can't happen" is that you
are unprepared with policies when it does. If you've assured the world
that there is no Hizb-ut-Tahrir problem whatsoever, forgetting even that
there might be if the prison policy changes (and it must if we are to
insist on our human rights ideals) -- then when a country *does* grow
more religious, even shy of the extremities of HuT, decision-makers are
unprepared. If you've spent years telling everyone that Islamic
fundamentalism in Tajikistan isn't really a problem any more and the
civil war is over and the threat is exaggerated, then you have no
framework to understand that pretty much all significant dissent in
Tajikistan seems to take the form of Muslim activism, and then
policy-makers may view what is normal and natural for a country as
suddenly a threat. The very analysis that seeks to minimize unrest or
religious revival in opposition to mythical promoters of these concepts
then winds up fueling the hysteria they claimed to see in the first
place.

Kendzior concludes by making it seem as if she is nuanced and thoughtful -- although she's told everyone to stop talking about civil society, she's told everyone that it is pointless to sign petitions, and she's told everyone there is no terrorist threat -- so it's all a sleight of hand and a propagandistic manipulation:

Uzbekistan poses the tough question of what should be done about a
country that does not respect international law or its own citizens.
There are no easy answers, but one way to start is by acknowledging that
the solution does not hinge on Western action, for good or for ill.

Focusing on military aid addresses Western hypocrisy - a subject
notable in its own right - but does little to address the everyday
challenges Uzbek citizens face. As the issue of Western military aid
brings renewed focus on Uzbekistan, we should make sure we do not
neglect the quiet, more pervasive forms of violence, the routine
brutality that takes place away from foreign eyes.

ALJ eats up anything that talks about "Western hypocrisy" but "Western hypocrisy" is the least of the world's problems because it's dictated by the world's far worse problems: Pakistani intelligence support of the Taliban and related groups; the Taliban and its supporters itself; Al Qaeda; Assad in Syria; Bashir in Sudan and the ongoing state-sponsored civil war, essentially; Putin in Russia and the suppression of civil society there; China hacking the US and suppressing its minorities and extracting resources to grow stronger. Kendzior seldom waxes eloquent on the hypocrisy of any of these abusive forces.

Indeed, the situation in part *does* depend on Western policy in support of internal actors. It has never depended on anything else. Nobody brought about a spring in Prague or Cairo by themselves; they had solidarity if nothing else, but more often somebody to help pay for printing presses, and today, circumvention software. It's a myopic, cynical and most of all immoral view (posing as amoral and pratical). There's nothing wrong with basing American foreign policy on morals.

Whenever
a person starts a supposedly serious article with the phrase..."the
Association for Human Rights in Central Asia, a group comprised mainly
of exiles from Uzbekistan,"

It shows that further reading is not necessary.

Ms. Kendzior...we get it. As a recent Anthropology PHD your insights
are INCREDIBLY valuable to world affairs. You completely understand
central Asian politics and the intricacies of Geo-politics...

Or it could be that you hate America and are willing to use this
incredibly valuable loudspeaker called AJE to bash anything pro-western.

AKROMIYA is real. YOU have debunked nothing and claims otherwise
shows your sheer hubris. My experience in the nation directly
contradicts your claims and will be happy to show you proof of the same.
Uzbekistan is a nation struggling to find itself after decades under
the Soviet thumb. Troubles? Yes. Evil? No.

And you left a quote out M'am..."The threat may not be imminent, but
extending security assistance to the Central Asian states is
justifiable, Blake maintained."

Please Ma'm...stop your attempts at political analysis. You are embarrassing yourself.